Tick-borne diseases in Australia

As someone with experience with immunofluorescence I would suggest being very wary of that. A positive result with three different organisms strongly suggests an artefact. Everything fluoresces with enough reagent. Immunofluorescent tests are only really meaningful if one thing is positive when everything else is negative. I am pretty sure that all competent labs would dismiss a result like this.

 

Does Bb cultured in blood suggest an artifact? Besides, you won't find many knowledgeable Lyme patients who like any form of the first tier, IFA or other. But that's what the Lyme gamekeepers prescribed decades ago with a puzzling algorithm, so an entire generation has been stuck with it.

Dismiss IFA results as part of a 2T? Doubtful. Most labs worldwide adhere to IDSA/CDC testing protocols when it comes to Bb. England simply embraces a newer "compromise" of the 2T, i.e., the C6 ELISA, but ultimately that too was/is promoted by the same folk who promote the different versions of the 2T.

 

Did you know that when Willy Burgdorfer was running labs on samples he was shipped from Long Island, NY, in which he would eventually discover the spirochete the world identifies with Lyme, close to 100% of all the patient samples he looked at tested positive for a ricketsia? The results were so overwhelming that reports are he was convinced ricketsia were behind the Lyme CT outbreak and Montaug knees. Obviously he changed his mind

 

Got to love the authors that in this paper acknowledge not just chronic Lyme - pretty much every one did back then pre-vaccine craze - but sero-negative Lyme as well. I think two of them were among the dozen or so authors of the 2006 Lyme Guidelines.

 

I understand it as three different species of the same organism. Ticks are infected with multiple species of borrelia and other co-infections. Natures dirty needles.

 

Yip really odd isn't it.

Complete about face with no scientific rationale or justification. Denying their own data. Now where have we seen that before!

 

And he also tripped over some nematodes too. Ticks really are disgusting creatures.

 

Yeah, nematodes get around. I think I read somewhere a while back they've been found on a space shuttle after returning to Earth. They are widely dismissed as being a meaningful factor in TBD's, but...

There's a boatload of things I'd like to run more tests on, including nematodes, if only to erase that "icky" variable that creeps into the corners of my mind. Add to that, though, seeing how symptoms fare with Bb alone with treatment, and then see the effects of treatment on Bb with the Swiss Agent, aka Ricketsia Helvetica - which, if you do the math, would have been the tandem Burgdorfer found back in 1981 or whatever in Montana in his gov't office.

 

This was my thought precisely.